There are a great many things to admire and enjoy in Csilla Toldy’s third chapbook of poems, Vertical Montage, which was recently launched by Lapwing Publications as part of the Belfast Film Festival 2018. Dedicated to the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, the book contains poems written loosely around the themes of film and filmmaking, and Toldy is certainly cinematic in her poetic approach. In ‘Tour Eiffel’ she conjures fluid images of one of cinema’s favourite landmarks, Paris’s ‘helpless princess’ who stands ‘in a solid kind of trance.’ On the previous page Paris is evoked again in ‘Brute and Beauty,’ a very striking tale of a city which, it is suggested, was saved from the destruction of war because of its beauty. The poem is introduced by a chilling quote from Adolf Hitler: ‘It has been my life’s dream to see Paris.’
War is the thread underpinning this collection, apart from the explicit theme of filmmaking. Toldy escaped from socialist Hungary as a teenager in 1981 and has a keen sensitivity for political conflict, most affectingly evoked in ‘Horror,’ her chronicle of a bombing from her childhood:
Metallic smell, unspeakable horror, like the clean rifle under your nose.
This is also expressed in ‘Bussokusekika’ (below), the most successful of the filmpoems accompanying this collection, which was selected for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2016. Running at only 1.14 minutes the film is a stomach-punch of empathy and the human cost of war. On the page the poem is beautiful but in the film it becomes a bilingual conversation between two soldiers on opposing sides. The painful politeness of the first lines,
I’m so glad to meet you.
It’s an honour to fight you.,
sent a chill down my spine, the use of black and white footage of men playing racketball mocking the absurdity of war.
Eisenstein was famed for his ‘montage’ technique of filmmaking in which arbitrarily chosen images, independent of the action and plot, would be presented in a sequence which would most affect the viewer. Toldy draws on this technique in her filmpoems, although in ‘Point’ and ‘Hommage to a Towering Shade’ I found it hard to look past the clashing fonts the poet uses which detract from her fine words.
Going back to the chapbook itself there is a great richness of theme and language in Toldy’s snapshots of life which span many eras and spaces. There is a quiet playfulness to the poet’s depiction of the famous photograph of construction workers eating lunch on scaffolding in ‘Lunch in the Sky.’ Through her eyes those men who built the empire state building fuelled by ‘air-borne bread and bacon’ are ‘humble and helpless like children.’ Toldy continues this theme of social history with a brilliant elegy for the emergence of advertising in America, ‘Neon Eldorado, 1920,’ and the charming ‘Bag-Piper in High Street Kensington.’ In this last poem, Toldy’s skill and balance as a poet can be seen in her ability to allow pathos into a scene of potential comedy. This is also apparent in the poem ‘Day for Night’ in which Toldy recounts, with a softness of touch palpable throughout her work, three men on a train ‘swaddling me, the eavesdropper with the melody of their Arabic.’
The finest poem is the epic ‘Berlin,’ in which Toldy wields her considerable command of language to evoke the chaos and trauma of war. It deserves a place in the canon of the most powerful of anti-war poetry. It begins,
O
Before the sky fell in
we danced to the music of our crazy laughs
Hilariously electrified by the current of a bleak future.
and ends,
We are the human gods
begging for forgiveness.
This review has not mentioned the references to filmmakers or the techniques of filmmaking which run throughout the collection for the simple reason that Toldy’s explorations of war are more successful, and it is these poems which make this chapbook a powerful work deserving of attention.
I will give the last word to Toldy herself, who in ‘The Cellist’ offers us a beautifully constructed and pared-back poem of loss and hope:
‘The Cellist’
rebelled against death
and destruction
his music saved the dignity
of the dying
restored the hope
of the living
his answer to war was harmony
he says
that with his life’s work done now
delirium can cloud his pain
and his dignity is the freedom
to destroy his body hoping to find
harmony in peace
Buy Vertical Montage (Lapwing Publications, 2018) here.
